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November 30, 2010

Most of my forays into nineteenth-century religious fiction involve controversial novels, which foreground doctrinal disputes (frequently to the disadvantage of the plot). Such novels feature extensive debates over religious topics, encyclopedia-style "dialogue," and sometimes footnotes or endnotes explicating thornier questions. Although they don't really model real-life religious debates, seeing as how the opponent always loses (and usually can't even muster a response), they do offer sound bites to those who might be on shaky ground when it comes to their own denominational background. Christiana Jane Douglas' Father Godfrey (1873), though, is less in the vein of Grace Kennedy's Father Clement and more in that of Anthony Trollope's Barchester novels or Margaret Oliphant's Chronicles of Carlingford. The characters all have their particular theological "slots," which drive the novel's primary conflicts, but despite Father Godfrey's topicality--it responds to the ongoing debates over Ritualism that would result in the Public Worship Regulation Act the following year--it has virtually nothing to say about the content of any one slot. The uninformed reader will come away from this novel thinking that Ritualism is something that involves a lot of sewing. Thus, the novel emphasizes social comedy (and, having peeked ahead, tragedy) over theological quibbling. Moreover, the narrator's faintly ironic attitude to a number of her characters suggests Austen, and the first volume, at least, has a slightly Pride and Prejudice-ish tint to it.

Father Godfrey is a multiplot novel that tracks the intersections of three families: the Wynfords, the Foxleys, and the Godfreys. The Wynfords and Foxleys are both old, landed families with more-or-less idealized conservative patriarchs. Squire Wynford is a "liberal landlord" (I.31) who maintains his estate in the spirit of mutual obligation celebrated by Victorian medievalists. Echoing Carlyle, the narrator informs us that "[s]upply and demand, noninterference, every-one-for-himself notions had no place at Thorleigh Court, where political economy, even in these days, had made but small advances, and where the very idea of an agricultural strike would have caused little less astonishment than a sudden eruption of fire and lava from the placid green summit of the Bloomshire Beacon, just visible on the northern horizon" (I.31-32). Wynford's estate thus appears to be a haven from the pressures of nineteenth-century industrialism and laissez-faire capitalism, which elsewhere impress themselves harshly on the landscape. And his tenants joyously embrace this nineteenth-century echo of feudal culture, resisting (indeed, not even acknowledging) modernity. Even more medieval are the Foxleys, "a noble family before the coming of the Conqueror" (I.55), headed by the somewhat Dedlockian Colonel Foxley, and boasting of an eminently beautiful daughter with the suitably Olde Englishe name of Elfrida. But unlike the wealthy Wynfords, the Foxleys are deeply impoverished. Moreover, they appear to be tapped out in another way: whereas Wynford son and heir Leigh is a reasonably intelligent, albeit spoiled, fellow, Elfrida is of the "blank-sheet class of mind" (I.127). Impetuous, not very smart, and given to what the novel hints are calculated fits, Elfrida turns out to have angelic looks but an unthinkingly selfish center--thus rendering her easy prey for the novel's resident Evil Anglo-Catholic Clergyman, Summerwood. (The eponymous Godfrey's nickname for Elfrida, St. Frideswide, turns out to be both prophetic and ironic.) Last but not least, we have the shabby middle-class Godfreys, who have come down in the world since the death of the father, a successful clergyman. The devout Frederick Godfrey attends Oxford (along with Leigh) with the intention of gaining a first and eventually helping his brothers and sister; however, he derails his family's plans by becoming a Roman Catholic priest instead, much to the fury of his anti-Catholic mother. Stranded without Frederick's financial contributions, the family is at a loss until his cultivated and strong-minded sister, Helen, volunteers to work as a governess in order to pay for her younger brothers' educations.

As the first volume unfolds, it becomes clear that the narrator simultaneously sympathizes with the older generation and admits that they have become anachronistic--even, in some ways, self-destructive. Her praise for their moral values sits alongside the effectively local nature of their influence, which is confined to their respective estates; the Foxleys, in fact, are quietly dwindling away, and their weak-minded daughter does not promise much hope for the family's future. Moreover, neither the Foxleys nor the Wynfords properly equip their children with much in the way of serious education or moral purpose, despite their own rectitude: there's little in the way of serious religion, the children are allowed to have their own way, and the parents turn out to be easily manipulated. By contrast, Mrs. Godfrey does instill her brood with strict values, but the narrator condemns the brutality with which she disowns Frederick after his conversion (I.152-53).

Arguably, the first volume's main theme is the sheer self-centeredness of what passes for religion in mid-Victorian culture. Mrs. Godfrey is wrong to denounce her son, but Frederick, too, is in the wrong for abandoning his obligations to his siblings. Helen is remarkably determined and self-sufficient, but the narrator quietly notes her moments of proud revulsion at her newly-bourgeois employers (who, despite their vulgarity, are rather nice people), and playfully mocks the self-aggrandizing manner that turns her job into potential "martyrdom" (I.187). Leigh seems to have no religious convictions whatsoever, but believes that the world will generally arrange itself to his liking. Elfrida, visiting an Anglican sisterhood, gleefully resigns "personal responsibility" to the not-exactly-impressed Mother Superior (I.257), then jilts Leigh without thinking of his feelings (I.272). And Mr. Summerwood has "a dauntless confidence in the power of his own will—a matchless capacity for persuading himself of the rectitude of his own wishes" (I.141) that leads him to interfere in Elfrida's and Leigh's relationship (mostly out of jealousy). To the extent that the narrator manifests her own sympathies, it is in the relatively tolerant and Broad Church-y position that Christianity's essence is "a feeling of oneness with all human creatures" (I.289)--a sentiment conspicuously lacking in most of the first volume.

November 29, 2010

Nobody spoke to suggest anything further. The matter seemed settled, or, at least, postponed for future discussion. The Godfreys were not much in the habit of making speeches to one another. In this respect I cannot think they were singular. Not many English families are, unless in fiction, and more especially in religious fiction, where brothers and sisters not only make long speeches, but occasionally preach extempore sermons to one another. But I never met with such a case in real life, and I cannot altogether say I regret it.

November 27, 2010

Emma Jane Worboise's anti-Tractarian and anti-Catholic Helen Bury: Or, the Errors of My Early Life (1850) and Jim Crace's thoroughly secular historical novel The Signals of Distress (1995) are two novels that appear to have nothing in common, and yet their respective approaches to disaster prove, I think, telling. Helen Bury's last name turns out to prefigure her career, which sees her burying her parents, her aunt, her sister-in-law, her husband, her best friend, and both her children, along with (figuratively) herself. But this sequence of burials, along with her husband's financial undoing at the hands of an evil Catholic attorney, has nothing random about it. In fact, given the novel's controversial subject matter, this cavalcade of death and disaster is only what the reader expects; once the narrator converts first to Tractarian views and then to Roman Catholicism--a transformation represented as itself an inevitable shift--she exposes herself to divine discipline. Emily, Helen's friend, warns that "if you be not induced to return by gentle means, a kind and loving Father will use sterner methods, and a storm will arise--one that may so desolate your way, that like the dove of Noah, you may find no resting place for the sole of your foot, and may so return to the ark of safety" (130). This proves to be the key to organizing the novel's events, albeit a key visible only in retrospect: even after returning to Protestantism, Helen must be stripped of all those she loves on earth, the better to rest in God's love. There is no suspense about either the ending or Helen's eventual renewal; indeed, the novel's point is that any suspense about Helen's future vanished the moment that she took the momentous step of following her husband-to-be (her "idol") into Catholicism.* Only her fall into Catholicism blinded her to the "obvious" consequences of her decision. Thus, the narrative ultimately expands from personal memoir to universal pattern--the necessary plotline for anyone misguided enough to fall for the Catholic snare. "If these pages fall into the hands of any readers, young and inexperienced, and untaught by the blessed Spirit, as I once was, and treading the verge of religious error," Helen exhorts her audience at the end, "may such readers be led, by their perusal, to search for themselves the Holy Scripture, and to test by its quenchless lamp the truth of those tenets, which by persuasions or other causes, they may be about to embrace. Then, not in vain shall I have recorded THE ERRORS OF MY EARLY LIFE" (254-55). Helen writes her own past so that readers may view and avert their possible future, largely by turning from one text (the book in front of them) to another (the Word itself).

By contrast, like most contemporary neo-Victorian novels, The Signals of Distress constructs a world in which suffering serves no purpose and has no spiritual referent. This is a small town/small village novel, and as is frequently the case in such tales, the clash of provincial insider and more cosmopolitan outsider results in considerable trauma for all concerned. Two lines intersect in the rather wretched seaside village of Wherrytown: Aymer Smith (his aim is pretty terrible), a schlemiel-type comic liberal, and Captain Comstock, a grumpy American captain. Aymer's specialty lies in the imagination, an ability to "put right in his mind's eye things that might go wrong in life" (245), and the detailed plots he concocts consistently collapse under the weight of circumstances and his own ineptitude. Murphy's Law runs rampant for poor Aymer: he ticks off most of the populace, wanders around without pants, has inappropriate fantasies about various women, and, in general, makes himself unwelcome. He does manage to liberate Comstock's slave, Otto--with what result, we never find out. By the end of the novel, thanks to a series of unfortunate events, he has not only suffered multiple personal and professional disasters, but has also undergone a truly horrific beating, thanks to the influence of local fixer Walter Howells. Comstock, who also falls prey to Howells, will get his comeuppance--along with a number of other people who clearly have done nothing to deserve it. This is a world in which villains (or, at least, Neutral Evil types) prosper without fear of justice, while less effective people (dupes or otherwise) bear the weight of the pain. There is no God here--except, perhaps, for the author--and no promise that things could be put right in the future; indeed, given the brutal ending, there is no future self-awareness at all for most of the characters. The inevitability of the novel's events derives not from a spiritual economy of sin and punishment, but from the literary economy of black comedy. In some ways, The Signals of Distress offers what could be a Victorian plot, but without the providential underpinning that would stabilize it, make its disasters significant.

*--Given Worboise's more overt engagements with Jane Eyreelsewhere, it's possible to read this novel as a sideways assault on JE's fairy-tale narrative. Like Jane, Helen treats her husband as an "idol," but the relationship cannot be reconstituted on earth after Herbert turns back to Protestantism--he still has to die, for his punishment and Helen's.

November 23, 2010

For the past few years, I've been looking now and again for Nightshade (1857), a novel by Irish anti-Catholic campaigner William Johnston. There are a scant few copies in various and sundry research libraries, the closest of them at Boston College, and I've never seen one for sale. Well, not until now, anyway. Here we have one of these anonymous-looking POD books of somewhat baffling provenance, sold by what appears to be an e-book club (also with a somewhat anonymous-looking home page). A number of these POD companies are simply scraping content from GoogleBooks, Project Gutenberg, and even Wikipedia, but Nightshade doesn't exist in full text on any free electronic archive. So where, I wonder, did the OCR come from? Does GoogleBooks sell otherwise inaccessible content to POD publishers? Are there legions of elves sneaking into research libraries to scan rare books?

ETA: Out of curiousity, I decided to see if I could download the PDF version. Because they wanted my money, right? Well, no--"Sorry, we can't provide this edition to someone in your country for copyright or other reasons." Let me see if I understand this correctly: you can't sell me a $9.99 PDF of an OOC book for copyright reasons, but you can sell me a $36+ paperback copy? How...interesting.

November 21, 2010

Last night, after packing some more books, I decided to pull Emma Jane Worboise's Helen Bury; Or, the Errors of My Early Life off the shelf. This, Worboise's first novel, tells the story of a young woman deluded by love and Tractarianism into becoming a (gulp) Catholic. Of course, Worboise being staunchly anti-Catholic and all, poor Helen suffers a series of disasters, until finally she returns to Protestantism. In any event, Helen tells us at one point that her Beloved Young Man, who Seduces Her to the Dark Side (not that he sees it as the dark side, of course, and there are no double-bladed light sabers involved), keeps giving her novels to read like "Sibyl of Rodenhurst."

Hey! I thought. Worboise probably wouldn't have singled out a novel by title if it didn't actually exist. I should go check!

1. I plug "Sibyl of Rodenhurst" into GoogleBooks. This yields me...Helen Bury and the Englishwoman's Magazine, the latter of which is either quoting or serializing Helen Bury (there's only a snippet available). Hrrrrm.

2. What about "Sybil of Rodenhurst"? No, that doesn't exist either. But...

3. There's a Rodenhurst; Or, the Church and the Manor (1845). Which has a heroine named Sybil! In which, according to the reviews, the villains are all evil Low Churchmen! A-ha! (But why is this novel available only in the dreaded snippet view? It was published in 1845! It's out of copyright! Really, it is!)

November 20, 2010

Although, like Tim Burke, I suspect that the Shadow Scholar* may be exaggerating just a trifle, I have no doubt that the ivy-covered (or concrete-covered) halls of academe are littered with undergraduates who have decided to add the price of hiring ghost writers to the price of tuition. In fact, one of my most precious memories involves an undergraduate explaining that s/he wasn't the one who had plagiarized the offending paper; it was the friend who actually wrote it. (After I retrieved my jaw from the floor to which it had unceremoniously dropped, I gently noted that this excuse didn't help their case any.) Yet so many of the excuses for students who plagiarize--it's the fault of the university system, or of boring instructors, or of corporate demands, or of pressure, or of a shortage of dark chocolate truffles, or whatever--neither take into account all the innovative, exciting, and with-it professors who still find plagiarized work making its way into their inbox, or the long history of exam and paper "hacks" (like the famed fraternity house exam bank).** Such explanations reduce a problem of centuries-long standing--when have people not plagiarized?--to something easily fixed. But if there's a system, people will game it, as various entertainment industries have discovered. Moreover, many of the "solutions" to the problem are not necessarily workable in an increasingly casualized academic environment: for example, I cannot imagine asking an adjunct teaching five classes at three different campuses (and, in all likelihood, with no office space) to interview every student about their arguments, just to be sure that everything's tip-top.

It sometimes feels as though academics are being sent off to chase the Holy Grail of assignments--That Which Cannot Be Plagiarized. True, instructors can develop assignments that are difficult to assemble by the much-vaunted (among plagiarizers) electronic cut-and-paste method, a technique that enables you to add a dollop of Derrida to your splash of Sartre and come out with...something that will get you an F in no time flat, usually. But money, whether or not it buys happiness, can certainly buy you even the most innovative assignment. ("Rewrite Bleak House as a vampire thriller, in which Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce is a nationwide cover-up for a conspiracy to transform the English court system into a haven for the undead.") There's a difference between minimizing opportunities to plagiarize, and expecting that you can find a Ring of Power that will make it disappear (preferably without turning you into a Nazgul). There will always be reasons to plagiarize that we cannot anticipate, cannot do anything about, or, sometimes, cannot explain. Which is another way of saying, to adapt a turn of phrase from John Ruskin, that perhaps we need to "confes[s] our imperfection" in this matter, and do the best we can.

*--Incidentally, this Victorianist's hackles raised at this bit: "I've read enough academic material to know that I'm not the only bullshit artist out there. I think about how Dickens got paid per word and how, as a result, Bleak House is ... well, let's be diplomatic and say exhaustive. Dickens is a role model for me." That's...not how Dickens worked. Really.

**--Also incidentally, Dad the Emeritus Historian of Graeco-Roman Egypt called while I was working on this post, and cheerfully reminisced about all the plagiarism that went on in the good old days--i.e., the late 1950s and 1960s.

November 17, 2010

Victorian publishers' in-house magazines were notorious for puffing their own merchandise, so the following is an interesting case of Saunders, Otley & Co.'s review, The Literary Budget, biting down hard on the hand that fed it. As I've noted before, despite the popularity of controversial fiction, many nineteenth-century readers found it a rather appalling genre:

Soon Over. 10s. 6d. (Saunders, Otley & Co.) The family of a Somersetshire rector go to live abroad. Many attempts are made by Roman Catholic Priests to pervert them, but all fail. All the young people turn out remarkably well, and are indeed rather painfully pious. The only interesting incident in the book, is when a little girl drops a feather bed out of window on the heads of her grandfather and grandmother; and this young lady becomes profoundly penitent immediately afterwards. Novels that turn upon religious controversy are objectionable, even when written by those who understand their subject; but Soon Over treats the questions at issue between the Churches of Rome and England with a kind of sublime silliness. An English schoolboy of ten is made victorious in argument over the most sagacious of Catholic priests. The author is evidently a very good young lady, but she knows nothing of theology, and requires more experience before she writes another novel.

November 16, 2010

The front and rear endpapers of Reginald Hill's standalone mystery The Woodcutter reproduce Winslow Homer's 1891 painting of the same name. Homer's woodcutter may be in a very American landscape, but he appears in Hill's Cumbrian novel under a variety of guises: inspiration, model, and sometimes warning. Woods, of course, occupy a very special place in fairy tales, and the fairy tale turns out to be one of this novel's most prominent influences. "Once upon a time I was living happily ever after," says our protagonist, Wilfred--a.k.a. Wolf--Hadda. "That's right. Like in a fairy tale" (17). The Woodcutter traces the collapse and reconstruction of Wolf's fairy tale plot, which crosses paths along the way with spy thrillers, Wuthering Heights (Wolf's life story bears some resemblance to Heathcliff's), the book of Job (albeit a Godless version), and, as others have pointed out, revenge tragedy. And the novel's thorough-going sweep of its villains by the end is almost entirely due to poetic justice, rather than the legal variety.

In a twist on Hill's usual method, most of the novel takes place not in a loosely-defined present, but in a precisely-dated but still loosely-defined future, with much of the action taking place about fifteen or sixteen years from now. Wisely hedging his bets, Hill informs us that everything in his imagined future is much the same as it is now...which, in fact, produces a rather grim view of England. Wolf's meteoric rise and fall rests on his successful work in high finance, which leaves him at the mercy of his "friends" (who jointly conspire to defraud him). Security cameras are everywhere; Wolf spends much of his time in a private prison; casual racism lurks everywhere; terrorist threats still loom large; the police force is riddled with corruption. And, in the background, lurks the very-ironically initialled JC, a sort of Mycroft Holmes-ish character who appears to do nothing, yet has his fingers in every proverbial pie. JC, the patron of many rising young men, at first appears to be Wolf's "savior," but the mantra he learns from his father--"When love is in opposition to grim necessity, there is usually only one winner" (6)--warns us that this savior sacrifices, instead of being sacrificed.

Significantly, where JC is very much a creature of London, Wolf's roots strike deep into rural Cumbria--even though his successful days saw him turn into an international jet-setter. Hill's earlier novels have invoked and sometimes deconstructed the "village cozy" mystery, as in the comic Jane Austen homage Pictures of Perfection (set in the quasi-utopian village of Enscombe) or, more recently, the much grimmer The Stranger House (where the village has nothing cozy about it). Here, the village is neither good nor evil--some residents are fine, some are jerks--but it lacks the dehumanizing qualities of JC's London. Nick Hay suggests that "one of the morals of the tale might be about the dangers of leaving a home to which one has such an umbilical tie," but Hill takes aim at something larger: the evils of any ambition that takes financial success as its primary reward. Wolf's wife Imogen, lawyer Toby, and purportedly close friends Johnny and Pippa all manage to abscond with cash from his companies; Imogen then seals the deal by marrying Toby. After, of course, a conspiracy to jail Wolf for sex crimes, just to get him out of everyone's way. Imogen's mother, Lady Kira, married the much-older Sir Leon Ulphingstone for his money and position, and now consorts with a wealthy Russian criminal. For that matter, one of the detectives investigating Wolf's case winds up taking a bribe. By contrast, Wolf's "elf," the psychiatrist Alva Ozigbo, must ultimately choose between her career ambitions and doing the right thing, and PI McLucky, formerly a detective assigned to watch Wolf when he is hospitalized, similarly winds up assisting him for reasons moral as well as monetary. Cash, in other words, turns out to be corrosive.

This being Hill, the narrative frequently dwells on both plotting and interpretation. After Wolf writes a truthful account of his troubles, which leaves Alva "disappointed" because "he was still in complete denial" (52), he manages to trick her into supporting his release on parole by faking his confessional texts. In effect, Alva, despite her close-reading abilities, falls prey to double-dealing dramatic monologues, in which the dramatic ironies of Wolf's revelations (despite his unwillingness to admit it, he is a criminal) turn out to cloak the revelation she initially refused to accept (he's innocent). Wolf's passage through the novel turns out to be marked by such moments of dissonance, some not of his direct intent, whether it's the local clergyman revisiting his own prejudices or a singularly happy-go-lucky ex-friend realizing that "today something was ending, and something was starting, something that not een the cleverest of solicitors was going to be able to put right, something that meant nothing was ever going to be the same again" (424). Initially the puppet in other people's plots, Wolf succeeds by gaining control of his own--and upsetting every other narrative in the process.

As it happens, the least satisfactory aspect of the plot is its conclusion. Putting aside the bizarre similarity to Iain Pears' Stone's Fall (the final revelation and denouement, while not identical, certainly overlap), the novel loses hold on its ability to keep fairy tale and psychological realism working in tandem. This reader found neither the final self-sacrifice nor the romantic wrap-up plausible, even though there's foreshadowing for both; Pictures of Perfection, Hill's previous venture into fairy-tale plotting, handled this aspect rather better. Overall, though, the novel is an absorbing read.